We report on the incorporation of a North American aboriginal procedure called "the talking circle" into primary care in areas serving this population. Communication is regulated through the passing of a talking piece (an object of special meaning or symbolism to the circle facilitator, who is usually called the circle keeper). Twelve hundred people participated in talking circles in which 415 ...

In order to render a high quality, versatile 3D talking head, a stable, high frame rate AV data acquisition system is constructed. It can capture 3D position, surface orientation and albedo texture of the talking head video images along with the corresponding speech signals. The system consists of a computer controlled LED lighting subsystem; high speed stereo cameras; a microphone; and a compu...

WHAT IS SLEEP TALKING? Sleep talking (or somniloquy) can be considered as a part of a larger family of types of “sleep utterances,” such as mumbling, laughing, groaning, and whistling during sleep. The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus already observed someone sleep talking about 2,500 years ago, so it is not a very recent discovery. It happens at all ages (provided that one is ca...

Speaker identification performance is almost perfect in neutral talking environments. However, the performance is deteriorated significantly in shouted talking environments. This work is devoted to proposing, implementing, and evaluating new models called Second-Order Circular Suprasegmental Hidden Markov Models (CSPHMM2s) to alleviate the deteriorated performance in the shouted talking environ...

This paper addresses the problem of multimedia presentation of a moving and talking head. Existing approaches either use a 3D geometrical representation or multiple 2D views to model and reconstruct faces. To achieve realistic appearance and personalization, and avoid complex models, we propose two approaches. First, we show how pure image-based view morphing can be used to create new moving an...